Following the siege in October 2017, and the forced eviction of the men from the prison at Lombrum to the prisons in Lorengau, the camp was physically erased. Three buildings remain in the middle of Foxtrot Compound; all other evidence of the past 4 years has been removed. The accommodation units, the murals painted on doors and walls, the fences through which hundreds of men gazed, searching for freedom, have all been dismantled. The policy that produced these physical markers, however, remains largely intact.

The Manus prison camp has been well documented by the people who were detained there. The men can likely still identify where their rooms were, where they queued for meals, where they protested and where they witnessed their friends die. The break-up of ‘Australia’s Guantanamo’ amounts to another attempt to erase a chapter of Australia’s colonial history. Like the others, however, it has not succeeded.